The world's first ATX-compatible, workstation-class mainboard for the IBM POWER8 processor.

We get asked a lot about why we aren’t using RISC-V for Talos™. This
update details our rationale and delves into the long history of POWER
over the past several decades.

RISC-V

As you may be aware, instruction set plays a minimal, almost
non-existent role in determining the performance of a modern processor
design. RISC-V CPUs, while interesting from a licensing perspective, are a
far cry from POWER8, x86, or even ARM in terms of raw performance.
This is not so much an intrinsic fault of the instruction set as it is
a complete lack of any high-performance cores and interconnect that
might be able to fully utlilize the attached third-party controllers,
such as those for DDR3/DDR4 memory and PCIe 3.0. Furthermore, basic
CPU blocks essential to sustained SMP performance and/or basic system
security are still absent on RISC-V, such as L3 cache or any type of
IOMMU.

RISC-V, which has not even reached production availability for
embedded systems as of this writing, is currently only able to
compete, at best, against very low end embedded ARM, low-end MIPS, and
similar offerings. Worse, by our most optimistic estimates, RISC-V at
its current development pace would take well over a decade to approach
even the performance of old x86 hardware from the late 2000s (roughly
Intel® Core 2 class machines). Finally, there is no real effort being
expended to make RISC-V into a workstation or server class processor,
and you only have to look as far as current ARM-based SoC offerings to
see how difficult and expensive it is to create a credible,
high-performance processor that competes in this market space.

POWER8

In comparison, POWER8 is available right now, today, and brings you
the best of both worlds. IBM doesn’t want to control your machines;
they simply give you very high performance hardware and the tools
required to control it, then let you handle the rest – this means
your machines can be as secure (or insecure) as you desire. OpenPOWER
cores and chip designs can be licensed and custom built by anyone with
sufficient resources, providing an unprecendented level of flexibility
for design in this high performance class. The continued revenue
derived from the manufacture and sale of both CPUs and licensed cores
helps to ensure the longetivity and stability of the POWER ecosystem
by not only funding future POWER CPU development, but also limiting
the ecosystem fragmentation that is currently hindering uptake of ARM
and RISC-V.

Evolution of POWER Processors

What was required to make POWER8 one of industry’s leading CPUs for
raw general purpose compute performance? A lot of well-funded
research and very hard work spanning almost 40 years! POWER, which
stands for “Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC”, traces its
origins back to an ambitious CPU project at IBM in 1977. The goal of
this project was to create a high-performance RISC CPU for mid-range
workstations and servers. By 1980 the first prototype of the IBM
801 was complete, and further
development of the associated RISC concepts led to the first POWER
processor in 1990. The newly christened POWER1 along with its
successor the POWER2 both found their way into the RS/6000
machines machines of the
1990s.

The POWER ISA has gone though a process over time that should be
familiar to almost any open source developer. It was repeatedly
forked, merged, and forked again as needed to create processors
tailored to specific market segments. One of these forks, technically
a fork of POWER1 commissioned by an alliance between Apple, IBM, and
Motorola, became the famous PowerPC processor line. Starting with the
PPC 601, this lineage was used in Apple products until finally being
dropped after using the PPC 970 in the mid 2000s.

Visualization of the evolution of POWER processors (credit: Henrik Wannheden)

The server branch of POWER remained under constant development through
the mid 2000s, yielding a continuous sequence of more and more
powerful devices. The forks that were not part of this server branch
were finally merged back into the renamed, monolithic “POWER
Architecture” as of the POWER ISA v.2.04, whose successor was used as
the specification for the POWER6 processor. POWER7 was mostly an
evolutionary step, while POWER8 is the first OpenPOWER processor and
the first POWER processor to officially support true bi-endian
behaviour. As such, OpenPOWER CPUs trace their lineage directly back
to the very first POWER1 workstation / server CPU prototyped in 1990.
Over the years they have gained more CISC operations, vector support,
64-bit support, and a host of other necessary features in much
the same way as their x86 competitors, whose history traces a very
similar path.

Conclusion

As you can see from this development process, it is quite presumptuous
to consider a CPU that has not even reached its first silicon
production milestone a worthy contender against the high-end POWER (or
even x86) workstation CPUs. POWER was always designed for workstation
use, while RISC-V has been designed with completely different goals in
mind. If you need a libre core to test a new microarchitecture or
core design idea, or are simply targeting an embedded system,
RISC-V is a very good choice. However, you’ll be much more efficient
creating that embedded design when using an OpenPOWER workstation!

Talos™ Mainboard and Accessories

The world's first ATX-compatible, workstation-class mainboard for the
new, free-software friendly IBM POWER8 processor. Includes one
heatsink and 92 mm fan, one ATX-compatible I/O shield, and a live
rescue DVD with factory reset utilities, source code for firmware and
FPGA components, mainboard schematics, user manual, and Ubuntu
installation media. CPU, RAM, power supply, storage drives, and
chassis sold separately.

No longer available

Free Worldwide Shipping

$7,100

Talos™ Desktop Edition (TALP8D050)

A complete Talos™ workstation with a CPU of your choice, 128 GB of DDR3 ECC RAM, an AMD Radeon RX 480 (8 GB VRAM) GPU, and two Western Digital WD40EFRX 4 TB SATA drives, all installed in a heavy-duty tower chassis. Comes pre-installed with Debian. Select the CPU by purchasing it as a separate item in the same order or under the same account - the CPU will be installed and ready to go before shipping.

No longer available

Free Worldwide Shipping

Desktop Environment

$7,600

Talos™ Storage Server (TALP8S050)

A complete Talos™ server with a CPU of your choice, 128 GB of DDR3 ECC RAM, LSI SAS controller, and two Western Digital 4 TB SAS drives, all installed in a heavy-duty 4U rack mount chassis with 24 3.5" hot swap SAS drive bays and redundant 1200 W power supplies! Comes pre-installed with either Debian or CentOS. Select the CPU by purchasing it as a separate item in the same order or under the same account - the CPU will be installed and ready to go before shipping.

No longer available

Free Worldwide Shipping

Operating System

$17,600

Complete Talos™ Workstation (TALP8W100)

A complete 12-core Talos™ workstation with 256GB of DDR3 ECC RAM,
installed in a customized, heavy-duty chassis with your choice of an
AMD® FirePro™ or nVidia® Tesla™ graphics card (see list). Also
includes built-in 4TB RAID1 (2x 4TB enterprise SAS disks and LSI SAS
controller), plus a pre-installed copy of Debian or CentOS to get you
up and running in no time!